Synology DS223, RAID 1 wiped by DSM: 100% recovered
4 To · 2026 · Bruxelles
Failure : A computer repair shop in Brussels took in a customer's NAS: a Synology DS223 with two 4 TB WD Red drives in a mirror. The unit had been warning for days that one drive needed replacing. The technician swapped the failing drive and, on restart, DSM offered to install itself fresh. He accepted. The installation reinitialised the volume: the data partition was gone and the mirror had nothing left to rebuild. The shop owner called us the same day. We asked him to bring both drives, including the old one that most people throw away after a swap.
Work done : We worked on the drive the NAS had dropped, and never plugged the enclosure back in: powering the DS223 up again would have let DSM write over the data. The old WD40AFAX was not dead. It had unreadable sectors clustered in one area, enough for Synology to call it failed, not enough to stop it being read. We imaged it sector by sector on PC-3000 Data Extractor, skipping the unstable areas first, then going back over them with longer timeouts until the copy was complete. The mirror was then rebuilt from that single image and the Synology file system mounted to pull the folders out. In RAID 1 both drives hold the same data, which is why the invoice covers one cloned drive, not two.
Result : The volume had been reinitialised, not physically erased: the data was still on the platters and the rejected drive was still readable. We returned 100% of the end customer's files on an external drive, four days after drop-off.
Synology BeeStation dropped: 300 GB of photos saved
4 To · 2026 · Bruxelles
Failure : Every photo a Brussels family had lived in one place: a 4 TB Synology BeeStation BST150 standing upright on a shelf. There was no second copy anywhere, because the station was itself the backup for the phones and the home computer. During building work someone knocked the shelf and the narrow, vertical unit fell on its side. After that the BeeStation would not start: no network access, nothing normal at power-up. The owner brought it to us without having tried to switch it on again and again, and that counted for a lot later.
Work done : Under the Synology label sat a 4 TB Seagate drive with media cache, taken out of the enclosure in the lab. The fall had damaged the heads: the drive could no longer read its service area and never reached ready state. Firmware access was locked too, and that is where most of the difficulty was.
We unlocked the ROM on the board, rewrote it and adjusted the drive's passport settings so it would start in technological mode without touching the damaged areas. A head map was then built: the failed heads excluded from reading, the good ones doing the work. The point was not to wear them out for nothing. Instead of a full 4 TB image, we located the partition, analysed its structure and read only the areas holding the photos, 300 GB in all. The reading itself ran over a week, at reduced speed and in several passes, to spare heads that were already weakened.
Result : The fall hit the heads, not the surface where the data lived, and that is what makes the result complete. All 300 GB of family photos were returned at 100%, with no missing files, on a new drive handed to the client.
Seagate 250 GB not detected: 100 % recovered and recloned
250 Go · 2026 · Bruxelles
Failure : A Brussels security company called us on a Monday morning: the workstation running their business software would no longer boot. The drive, a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 fitted in an HP Compaq 8000 Elite, was spinning normally but had stopped appearing in the BIOS. It held not only the company's files but a specialised application installed years earlier, whose installation media and licence keys had long since vanished. Reinstalling was not an option: the whole system had to come back, not just the documents. Fortunately the client had not spent days switching the machine on and off.
Work done : Diagnosis showed a mechanically healthy drive: platters spinning, heads positioning correctly. The fault was in the service area. Connected to the terminal through PC-3000, the drive answered, but its configuration modules would no longer read properly: the translator was unreadable, which is exactly why the BIOS saw nothing. We worked directly in the service area to rebuild the translator and make the user space addressable again. The surface itself was tired: this 2011 drive had built up a large number of bad sectors. Imaging was therefore done under Data Extractor, map by map, pushing the slow zones to the end of the pass so the drive was not restarted needlessly. Once the full image was in hand, we wrote it back to the new drive the client had brought in, system and software included.
Result : The failure was in the service area, not on the heads: that is what made a full recovery possible. 100 % of the data was read, and the workstation went back with its system and its business application intact, on a brand-new drive.
